Imagine a world where the air, even in major cities, poses no serious health threat, even during the summer. Lakes once dead from acid rain have begun to recover. And trees and crops no longer die from air pollution. Many large cities and all rural areas have taken down their transmission wires, because the owners of homes, apartment buildings, factories, and offices rely upon fuel cells or upon solar power produced on-site. We may be too late already to avoid serious disruption from global warning, but this world would, over time, ameliorate climate change as well. Our reality is far different, but movement toward sustainable development must involve substantial steps toward creating the technological pattern that might make this world possible.

Sustainable development requires the replacement of old technologies with new, cleaner ones. Generally, the United States has adopted the type of air quality programs that Agenda 21¹ recommends; indeed, those programs were in place at the time of the Earth Summit in 1992. Owing to a lack of fundamental technological change, however, the United States has not met the ambitious goals for environmental programs implicit in the broad principles of the Rio Declaration.² Fully meeting those goals requires a phaseout of coal-fired power generation, a substantial movement toward renewable energy, a thorough going change in vehicular technologies, enforcement of the Clean AirAct (CAA), and improvements in emissions monitoring. We must redesign regulation with an explicit goal of encouraging fundamental innovation in order to achieve this sort of change.

This Article begins by canvassing the commitments made in Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration that have special relevance to air quality. This review of international commitments also provides basic background on air pollution, explaining why achievement of the relevant international goals matters. This first part also links air quality concerns to the problem of sustainable development. The Article then turns to an assessment of progress toward these commitments, through a look at emission trends and the movement toward sustainable technology. The final section articulates recommendations for improving U.S. conformity to Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration.